Headlines & Stuff November 22, 2013

Written by: Christy Wise

Here are some cool things we read about this past week:

Twitter Adds TV Conversation Targeting
This week, Twitter announced a new feature that allows networks and brands to promote tweets to people who chatter about certain shows, whether or not the brand is running a TV spot during a given program.

Foursquare Opens Up Home Screen to Big Brands
In a bid to boost revenue, Foursquare will now let brands that don’t have a physical location advertise on its most prominent real-estate: the app’s home screen. MasterCard I the first business without a brick-and-mortar presence to place an ad on Foursquare’s home screen as part of a month long campaign.

Pinterest Adds Place Pins for Better Travel Planning
Pinterest added a new type of pin called Place Pins this week, enabling users to map out the locations of all the items they share on their pinboards. For example, if a user pins a photo of a burger from a local restaurant in her neighborhood, she can also add the restaurant’s location to a map on her board. With these locations, users can create pinboards for trip planning and highlight hotspots in their neighborhood.

Snapchat Sees More Daily Photos Than Facebook
Snapchat now shares 400mm snaps each day, up 50mm since September of this year. This number surpasses the photo-sharing activity on both Instagram and Facebook. Facebook sees 350mm photos uploaded per day and Instagram sees around 50mm.

LinkedIn Announces Showcase Pages
LinkedIn is now letting brands create pages for specific products in a bid to bolster its positioning as a content-marketing channel. While LinkedIn already has Company Pages — more than 3mm of them — that allow businesses to post status updates and job openings, now it will let them give more granular updates about product offerings and divisions. Showcase Pages are connected to the primary Company Page and can be assigned separate admins. See examples in action here and here.

Global Social Media

Germany Set to Grab Top Social Networking Spot from the UK
The UK will lose its spot as the top social networking country in Western Europe by the end of 2014 with Germany set to push the British into second position. The number of social network users in Germany is expected to reach 35.4mm by the forecast period, which is more than the UK’s estimated 33.9mm by that same time. In terms of Facebook the UK still tops with nearly 30mm residents accessing the site per month, compared to 22.1mm users in both France and Germany.

Noteworthy Campaigns

Inspiring Unilever Ad Gives You Hope for Future Children
This week, Unilever launched a new initiative called “Project Sunlight,” an online portal which showcases social missions of Unilever brands around the world, and invites consumers, especially parents, to share their own stories about improving health, education and the environment. The company has partnered with UNICEF and Save the Children in an effort to create 2 million “acts of sunshine” — things like supplying school meals, drinking water, and improved hygiene for kids, as part of the program. At the heart of the campaign is a tear-jerker (but yet hopeful) video (released on Universal Children’s Day), directed by Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris, called “Why Bring a Child Into This World?” The video has just over 3.5mm views.